You Must Set Forth at Dawn (6 page)

Gerry had visited me in Nigeria several times—in Ibadan, Ife, and Abeokuta—the first time as a member of the exploratory team of the British director Joan Littlewood, who was seeking to film my play
The Lion and the Jewel.
Each visit was marked by one memorable event or another, but perhaps none more unsettling than his stay in Abeokuta while I was still living in a rented house, supervising the building of the first-ever home—modestly conceived at the time—that I could call my own. Gerry, to whom the combination of heat and humidity remained a potentially fatal threat, spent all night in my motorcar with the engine running to guarantee an air-conditioned environment. My home, alas, lacked such a basic amenity. This meant, quite simply, that I got no sleep that night, since a stubborn specter stuck to the inner membrane of my eyelids: Gerry's corpse in the morning, gas fumes having seeped into the interior of the car. Earlier efforts to make him seek remedy in a bathtub filled with cold water—where drowning in his sleep was less likely than carbon monoxide poisoning—had proved futile. My guest insisted that he entertained no fear of death by water but argued that submersion in water all night would only aggravate his condition. I went downstairs every half hour to seek a clear patch in the misted-over windows through which I could check if he was still breathing. The following night, after intense persuasion, I induced him to transfer to a commandeered air-conditioned room not far from me, just for the nights, while he returned to spend waking time with a host who otherwise would have turned into a nervous wreck.

The invitation to Westmoreland was mainly for Anna. She was then looking for a subject for her thesis in social anthropology, and it occurred to me that the story of Bekuta was a ready-made subject: a violent dispersal, exile, enslavement, liberation, the search for a substitute homeland and—resettlement. It was a research subject for which I made no attempt to disguise my own vested interests. What was left of the cultures of the original homeland? How had the descendants adjusted? Had polygamy survived? That last was inspired by more than a cursory interest in a return to roots. It could produce, maybe, objective criteria for evaluating a social philosophy that contrasted so profoundly with serial polygamy, as practiced in the “progressive” Western world. Was there any syncretism in the new microculture of the
araa Bekuta
¹⁴
with the cultures of other Jamaican settlers or indigenes? And so on. Anna came armed with a tape recorder and video camera, seeking preliminary material with which to persuade her supervisors that this was a worthwhile subject for a thesis. I was prepared to accompany her project statement with a recommendation of such enticing prospects—even in blank verse, if that would help—that it would make her supervisors salivate and even attempt to take over the project to boost their résumés.

It took a while to find the village on this decisive encounter, far longer even than the journey from Kingston, where the driver had done his best on those treacherous, sometimes vertiginous roads, to ensure that we prematurely gained my dream patch of the afterlife. On the way back to Kingston, however, I had cause to regret that he had not succeeded, had not ended the dream in the most brutal way that he appeared mindlessly capable of doing, so complete was the collapse of my anticipations. Only five years had passed since my “Mandela” visit, and yet not many people in neighboring, virtually next-door villages appeared to have heard that exotic word—
Bekuta
! Those whose eyes lit up at the sound were no longer sure if it still existed.
Bekuta? Sure, me once know the
place. But is it you going find anyone still living there?

We had embarked on the search on our own, seeking, unlike black Americans, tributaries, not roots. It was an extended holiday in Jamaica, one of those infinite weekends, so there were no officials to act as guides—not that I needed them, I boasted, Egba blood would call to Egba, never mind that I routinely refer to myself not as Egba but as Ijegba—a marriage of Ijebu and Egba, the two Yoruba branches of my parentage. As for any local descendants of the Egba clans we might chance upon, they had long substituted rum and ganja for palm wine and kola nut, the calypso and reggae for juju and
agidigbo.
¹⁵
Fortunately, such was my impatience that, the very afternoon of our arrival, late as it was, I decided that we would do some reconnoitering before dark. Thus we would eliminate several false leads, leaving only a handful of blind alleys and mountain cul-de-sacs for the following day.

And we did find Bekuta with only a little extra agony the following morning. The old lady was dead, but that was to be expected, she had long been ready to be called home. Something far larger had died, however, and that was Bekuta itself. It was the old lady who had kept up the settlement and its traditions through sheer willpower—we knew that already, but had not guessed how solitary a task it had been, how her spirit had been the existential force of the village. Now the homestead had died with her. The younger generation had pulled up stakes and departed. Her granddaughter, who was settled a modest walking distance away from Bekuta, found my pilgrimage amusing . . .
but no
one pay much time for that Africa foolishness. She only one keep all that in she
head, so when she gone, no one pay any mind to such things. If only she knew what rusty daggers she was using to slash at my entrails!

Yet some stubborn retention was in evidence, as we found when we visited the original site with its few surviving relics. We put questions to them one after the other, Anna ran her miniaturized camera on the miniaturized village and took notes, but it was clear that this was no treasure trove for the would-be researcher, and there seemed to be even less substance to my quest. It was some consolation—as if the spirit of the dead matriarch still ruled in odd corners of a few hearts—that the daughter, that same dismissive daughter, was still unable to tear herself away from the terrain completely. She had stayed behind, and her mother's grave was in her small orchard, neat, carefully tended, and overlooked by the rockhills, upon which, I could only hope, the matriarch's eyes had closed at the end.

But the times had been unkind to Bekuta. Piece by piece, the story of the death of a village was elicited through indifferent voices. Some years earlier, a flash flood had sent torrents cascading down from the mountains and swept away much of the hillside settlement, washed away the crops, and even taken a toll in lives. The survivors had relocated in a few terraced plots scooped into the hills, protected by overhanging rocks, but mostly in the plains below. A year later, Nature had struck yet another blow—a renewed flooding—and the spirit of Bekuta had been broken. The village was now in the throes of death, and the old lady's passing simply had sealed its fate. Three, four years after her death, the last of the small community—with any shred of vitality—had vanished. The jungle had reclaimed its space.

DISPIRITED, WE RETURNED to our hotel. And then, while I lay in bed licking my wounds, from across the ocean, thousands of miles away, another Egba spirit flew away. The news came on my portable radio, and it sounded so strange, a floating contradiction that was at once detached from yet infused with the world from which I had myself just earned a lover's rebuff. My young cousin, the
abami eda
¹⁶
whom the world knew as Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was dead. He had not yet attained his sixtieth year.

A naked torso over spangled pants, over which a saxophone or microphone would oscillate onstage, receiving guests or journalists in his underpants while running down a tune from his head, in the open courtyard, at rehearsals, or in any space where he held court—all constituted the trademark of his unyielding nonconformism. Far more revealing than such skimpy attire, however, were his skin-taut skull and bulging eyes, permanently bloodshot from an indifferent sleeping routine and a dense marijuana infusion. His singing voice was raspy, intended not to entice but to arrest with trenchant messages. Sparse and lithe, Fela leaped about the stage like a brown, scalded cat, whose
miaow
was a rustle of riffs eased from a saxophone that often seemed better maintained than his own body. Fela loved to buck the system. His music, to many, was both salvation from and an echo of their anguish, frustrations, and suppressed aggression. The black race was the beginning and end of knowledge and wisdom, his life mission to effect a mental and physical liberation of the race. It struck me as a kind of portent, that it was while visiting this distant outpost of my home, Abeokuta, in Westmoreland, propelled—but quite soberly, objectively—by thoughts of death, that I would receive news of the death of that other musician member of my family: the irrepressible maverick Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

How would one summarize Fela? Merely as a populist would be inadequate. Radical he certainly was, and often simplistically so. Lean as a runner bean, a head that sometimes struck me as a death mask that came to life only onstage or in an argument—more accurately described as a serial peroration, since he was incapable of a sustained exchange of viewpoints, especially in politics. Only Fela would wax a record according heroic virtues to such an incompatible trio as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea, and—oh yes, indeed—Idi Amin Dada, the terror of Uganda. It was, however, sufficient for my cousin that, at one time or the other, they had all challenged, defied, or ridiculed an imperial power—any voice raised in denunciation of the murders by Idi Amin or the torture cages of Sekou Toure was the voice of a Western stooge, CIA agent, or imperialist lackey. There were no grays in Fela's politics of black and white.

Memories flitted across the night—such as one of my least treasured experiences, the feeling of being designated as dog food! It was 1984, and I had traveled to Paris in order to campaign for Fela's freedom at a mammoth music concert under yet another dictatorship, that of General Buhari. Buhari's government had flung him into prison on spurious charges of a currency offense. Under the general antiracism and human rights slogan
“Touche pas mon pot!”
— “Don't touch my friend!”—the organizers of the concert planned to devote a special spot to publicize Fela's unjust imprisonment and mobilize world opinion on his behalf. I had accepted their invitation at extremely short notice, and had never before attended a pop music concert, having no inclination toward high-decibel events and mass excitation.

The trouble came from my efforts to approach the sacred arena where the artists, handlers, and other participants were tented. I shot to the venue straight from dumping my bags at the hotel and without the dozen or more passes required to open up the succession of barriers—someone had omitted to provide them. My lasting image from that concert was that of me about to be eaten at each barrier by teams of obviously starved Alsatian dogs, launched—it appeared—by their handlers, even while they pretended to restrain them. Nobody will ever persuade me that those dogs are ever fed or that they are not trained to identify innocent humanity as their next meal! I had seen footage of white police officers unleashing kindred monsters on black protesters in apartheid South Africa. At no time did the thought ever cross my mind that I would someday come close to taking over those victims' role in Paris, especially as an honored guest. My mission, I assumed, was to deliver a message to the world, thereafter escaping into the sanity of the farthest café from the raucous, stoned environment within which millions of presumably sane people would actually find a night of ecstasy. Still, once within the protective barriers, I carried off my mission with all due dignity, as became an ambassador of the “Black President,” one of Fela's many unofficial titles, and delivered my message against the background of his blown-up image even as his music was blared out to the Paris night.

For nearly the last five years of his life, Fela was fully convinced not only that he was a reincarnated Egyptian god but that he had actually begun to reverse the aging process and would again revert to childhood and infancy. By that token, my aburo would have watched his own funeral, unobserved by mere mortals. Wreathed in a marijuana-induced serenity—for I have no doubt that there would be gardens of vintage ganja in Fela's Heaven—he would have enjoyed the irony of his funeral, the magnitude of which was an unintended gift to us on the outside. He was laid in state at the huge Onikan racecourse in the heart of Lagos, a now-degraded monument to vainglory that an earlier dictator, Yakubu Gowon, had built for himself. It had been designed as a parade ground that would show off the might and splendor of the military regime, and the first visiting dignitary to grace those grounds would have been Queen Elizabeth II of England. Alas, while attending a meeting with other African heads of state in East Africa, Yakubu Gowon learned that he had been overthrown in a coup mounted by his own palace guard, and the royal visit was canceled. I found it altogether fitting that Fela should lie in state on those grounds as nearly a million of his countrymen and -women came to pay him tribute.

On the day of Fela's funeral, the whole of Lagos stood still, all businesses were suspended, and all governmental presence was banished. The mammoth crowd at the funeral of this most vocal and unrelenting dissident being was, first, a tribute to his person. Following this, however, it was also a statement of defiance to the regime of Sani Abacha. Despite his quixotic outbursts, nearly blasphemous since they appeared to support the rule of Sani Abacha, the fundamental message of Fela's art and lifestyle was anathema to any military or dictatorial regime, and thus he remained persona non grata even to Sani Abacha, whose persecution of Beko, Fela's brother, was a reminder to the maverick tunesmith that not even he was untouchable. Fela's funeral was thus an occasion that the people exploited to the full, pouring out in a way that defied the regime's ban on public gatherings, making the Black President the mouthpiece of their repressed feelings, even in his lifeless form. Neither the police nor the military dared show their face on that day, and the few uniformed exceptions came only to pay tribute. Quite openly, with no attempt whatsoever at disguising their identities, they stopped by his bier and saluted the stilled scourge of corrupt power, mimic culture, and militarism. It was a much-needed act of solidarity for us.